Roughly speaking since Wood was born intercourse between persons by means of conversation has become so perfected that it is now possible for {260} two people, one in New York and the other in San Francisco, to converse over the telephone--wireless or otherwise--as easily as could two persons when Wood was born talk from one room to another through an open doorway. So that for practical purposes the three or four thousand mile breadth of this continent is reduced to what then was a matter of ten feet. One might continue indefinitely, but these two examples are sufficient. If San Francisco is no further away than the next room and if London can be reached as quickly as New London, and if myriads of other physical changes of this sort have occurred in sixty years, then it is fair to assume that there has been an equal amount of resulting psychological change. These changes in the relation of man to his surroundings and the consequent changes in his relations to himself and his fellow beings have probably done more to rearrange the world on a different basis than all the developments of the half-dozen centuries that preceded the nineteenth. The elimination of distance, the making of human relation as easy for continents as for {261} adjoining communities lessens the size of the world and standardizes the rules that govern life. All intellectual, political, commercial and military procedures have changed therefore in the last half century to a greater extent than in hundreds of years prior thereto. One race in the fifth or sixth grade of civilization begins to discover what the other race in the first grade is doing. One commercial country of a lower order finds what it is losing because of another country of a higher order of commercialism. The laborers of Barcelona discover what the laborers of New York are receiving in compensation for the same work. The people of Russia discover the different political conditions existing amongst themselves and the people of England and France. The government of the German Empire sees what a united nation backed by the biggest army on earth might do in Europe. The men of Austria who have no vote learn what the men of the United States procure from universal suffrage. With the belief on every human being's part that the other fellow is better off than he, with the education which goes on through the medium {262} of emigration and immigration, with the immense number of detail short cuts, with the prodigious increase in reading and the resulting acquirement of the ideas of others, with the myriad of other matters patent to any one who thinks--with all this and because of it the methods and procedure of daily life have changed entirely throughout most of the civilized world since a man who is now nearly sixty was born.